The author of the Mary Poppins stories was P.L. Travers,
(the P.L. standing for Pamela Lyndon). She wrote 8 Mary Poppins
stories and elements of her early books inspired the popular Walt
Disney movie in 1964.

It surprises many people to learn that P.L. Travers, the creator of
these stories set in London featuring an English nanny, was actually an
Australian. She was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland,
on 9th August, 1899. Her family moved to another Queensland town,
Allora, when she was three.

In February 1907, her father, Travers Goff, who was a bank clerk,
passed away. This event was to affect her deeply. As the family was
without a breadwinner, it led to her mother, Margaret, and two sisters,
Biddy and Moya, later that year moving to a cottage in Bowral NSW that
was rented for them by a wealthy aunt. Lyndon was around eight years of
age at the time of her arrival in Bowral and was enrolled in the local
branch of the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School.

PL Travers recalled vividly on two occasions later in life - one in
a letter to a friend and the other in an interview - a dramatic
incident that took place when she was about 11 years old. This incident
signalled a new stage of her life and also answered the question, in
her own mind, as to where Mary Poppins came from. Lyndon's mother had
never really adjusted to the death of her husband and to her own
reduced circumstances. One evening on a day marked by a heavy downpour
of rain, her mother ran from their house in Holly Street in a
tremendously anguished state, declaring that she was going to drown
herself in the creek that passed near the back of the property. This
naturally alarmed Lyndon and her sisters. But instead of panicking and
making her younger sisters even more anxious, Lyndon did something that
was a perhaps a portent to her future. To calm the anxious girls, even
while fearful herself, she gathered them around the fire and told them
a story of her own creation, about a magical white horse.

In the story, this horse could gallop across the sea like a
shimmering comet and fly, even though it had no wings. It could dive to
the bottom of the sea. Her sisters became transfixed by the story, it
seemed they forgot the potential family tragedy that threatened in the
nearby creek as they listened to the exploits of the magical white
horse. Years later, P.L. Travers was to state her certain belief that
this magic white horse ran underground and came up eventually as Mary
Poppins. The magic of the story worked - not only by amusing and
enthralling her sisters in the midst of a traumatic scene - but soon
after her mother came back into the house, drenched to the bone but
thankfully alive.

Just as the magical white flying horse appeared to enchant back to
happiness and normality a family that was on the brink of breakdown, so
later did Mary Poppins fly into the lives of the Banks' family to work
her magic. And the original books depict Mary Poppins as a creature
capable of such transformations and fantastic travel. Remarkably, that
house in Holly Street still exists today, much as it did then. Even the
original fireplace - around which the birth of the storyteller we now
know as P.L. Travers and the genesis of her most famous character took
place -has been uncovered and found to be still working.

Valerie Lawson's biography states Lyndon Goff attended the
Normanhurst Private Girls School, a boarding school in Ashfield, a
suburb of
Sydney, from about the age of 13. But her family continued to live in
Bowral and she returned there for the lengthy school holidays that
boarding schools of that era typically scheduled. There exists a photo
of Lyndon with her sisters playing in the flooded creek near their
Holly St home in 1915. Lawson also describes how a number of her
characters in the Mary Poppins books were drawn from real life people
in Bowral, notably the sweetshop proprietor, Mrs Corry and her twin
daughters, the artful Uncle Dodger and the mischievous Nellie Rubina.
Bowral was the place in Australia that P.L. Travers lived with her
family for the longest period and it embraced her most important
formative years of childhood and adolescence, from the age of around
eight until she was 17.

For a more detailed account of the white horse story by Travers'
biographer, Valerie Lawson, click here

Acknowledgements: The
content on this website is indebted to many sources and attribution is
given where possible. In particular, it draws on the biography of PL
Travers by Valerie Lawson Out of the Sky She Came (1999) and
conversations with a longtime friend of P.L. Travers, Patricia Feltham.
But no inference should be drawn that this or any other attribution
indicates endorsement by those individuals of the website's content. In
particular, neither individual is making the claim that Bowral is the
birthplace of Mary Poppins. Responsibility for that claim and all the
website content is accepted by Paul McShane, Convenor - BookTown
Australia info@booktown.com.au